Common Cold??

 

I'm with Ogden Nash on this one....

By pounding brow and swollen lip;
By fever's hot and scaly grip;
By those two red redundant eyes
That weep like woeful April skies;
By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;
By handkerchief after handkerchief;
This cold you wave away as naught
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught!

Subsitute woman for man in the last line and you'll get the picture.  The handkerchiefs have (by neccessity) now been replaced by kitchen roll.         

Anyway, we've all been there and I guess it's more of an inconvenience than anything else so moving on.  I'm not spending too long typing today, but I did take some pictures in the garden (fresh air to try to clear the head a bit) and as the rain has moved in there were plenty of raindrop shots to choose from.  The shot above has been cropped as I really liked the yellow rim to the droplet.      

The red leaves above belong to a plant related to St. John's Wort (I can never remember which variation) and they measure about two inches from leaf tip to leaf tip.  It is a plant that has, by turns, these lovely red leaves, yellow flowers, beautifully shaped seedheads that are dark brown/black and berries that change from green to black.  It has an unlimited number of photo-opportunities.  I took the picture below in January of this year, showing the opened seedheads balancing snow.    

The plant below actually is (I'm almost sure) St. John's Wort.  These droplets on the back of the leaf were really defying gravity in the breeze.    

You may realise from this small bundle of photographs, that I spend quite a lot of time in the back garden taking pictures.  I'm not a gardener by any stretch of imagination; I may do some weeding from time to time and I try to keep it tidy, but otherwise the plants are left pretty much to themselves.    There are always things to discover and new plants that have self seeded - we discovered a very young rowan tree growing in one of the containers which has clearly been left to us by a passing bird (the tree, not the container obviously....).  

I'm off now to go back to mooching around, snivelling and reading stories by Mark Twain and James Thurber to try to cheer myself up :)  If this doesn't work, I'll dip into the Laurel and Hardy dvds that were given to me at Christmas.  I'd have to be dead not to laugh at L & H  - actually, that might be a good test to make sure that I've really gone!  I must tell Mr. Pugh......